September 30, 2001:

One of the problems with combating terrorism
that I have not yet seen mentioned is that far too many of our law enforcement
personnel are embroiled in battles over trivia. We have over-regulated
and over-legislated our society to such a degree that we can't really
combat anything in the scramble over how to enforce the laws we already
have. Out in the Scottsdale area, the police are regularly called to enforce
the area's lunatic zoning laws, including those that limit the colors
of paint you can apply to your house. Is this smart? We are spending immense
amounts of law-enforcement time and energy chasing marijuana smokers and
people who publish algorithms for breaking DVD copy protection. I'd really
rather they be chasing terrorists, thank you.

So here's my suggestion: For the duration of this "war," whatever
shape it ends up taking, suspend all enforcement of unnecessary laws. These
would include prohibitions on marijuana cultivation and use, all zoning
laws, all deed restrictions, all "blue laws," laws against "actions
between consenting adults," all laws limiting freedom of expression
(including publishing the DeCSS algorithm) and so on, to embrace anything
a non-fanatic would consider a victimless crime. My guess as to the results?
Nothing much would change except that we'd have more law enforcement
personnel available to keep an eye on terrorists.

September 29, 2001:

I
was saying this the day after planes started flying again, but it's nice
to hear that the CEO of Boeing concurs: There has probably never been
a safer time to fly than now. It's not necessarily convenient, what
with the FAA panicking over toenail clippers in carry-ons, but with all
eyes on aviation, it's unlikely that any plot to grab another airliner would
go undetected. Carol and I won't be flying again until Christmas, I suspect,
but it will be interesting to see whether air traffic has returned to normal
(or near normal) by that time. Some of my friends who have flown in the
past ten days have indicated that the planes are mostly empty. So where
will the terrorists strike next? Well, what aren't we watching?

September 28, 2001:

Once
I saw the teeny little Raspberry pager (the one with the minuscule QUERTY
keyboard) I knew they were on to something. I have a Handspring Visor
but I don't care for the Graffitti stylus system of writing and use it
as little as I can get away with. Writing anything substantial with it
is hopeless, and even taking notes is painful in the extreme. So it was
with interest that I saw notice of the Panasonic
Toughbook 01, a fat PDA with a Raspberry-style mini-keyboard. The
Toughbook is ruggedized against damage by dropping, a problem I encountered
just a few weeks after getting my first Handspring. I dropped it on the
driveway, and even
though it was in its little padded Naugahide sheath at the time, it was
DOA when I picked it up and got it into the house.

A rugged PDA is a good idea, but the Toughbook is immense next to
the Palm-oids, and weighs a whole pound. Not exactly pocket-fillings.
The little keyboard appeals to me, however. Not that one would ever touch
type on it, and certainly not the way I type. But for taking quick notes
or responding tersely to emails, it would definitely be the way to go. I
haven't seen any consumer reactions to the Toughbook 01, but it would be
interesting to see how this thing is actually used in the field. It reminds
me of those "belt-held" custom inventory computers you see people
with in supermarkets, counting jars of salsa with. Another use might be
for the extreme sports crowd, who might want to have a rugged computing
platform with them while they're trekking the Rockies. Given that there's
a GPS add-in, you'd think it'd be a natural for the back-country crowd.

September 27, 2001:

Many Web commentators are advising a boycott
of Windows XP until Microsoft removes the feature that conks the operating
system when you change out hardware, even something as simple as installing
a new hard drive. I see nothing compelling about XP that isn't already
in Windows 2000, and I'm inclined to add my voice to this. Don't buy
XP. Don't upgrade to XP. Get yourself a copy of 2000, or be adventurous
and see if you can survive using Linux.

Now, the kicker, of course, is that almost nobody but us techno-weenies
ever upgrades an operating system. People get an operating system pre-installed
when they buy a machine, and it's rare that anyone ever upgrades what comes
with their hardware. So MS will probably win this one as well, with the
sole consolation that PC sales are in the toilet right now. I'm keeping
my Windows 2000 install set, so that when I replace one of my three machines,
I can nuke XP and stay on the path I've chosen.

September 26, 2001:

The
slowest part of many modern Web sites to display isn't the bitmaps on the
Web siteit's the ads, which must be delivered through a separate
ad server, which may well be overloaded and thus slow. So although I'm not
rabidly against Web site ads, I object to being made to wait while somebody's
ad message works its way to me through a server queue. It's gotten bad enough
lately to prompt me to begin researching browser add-ins that somehow eliminate
ads. I'll report here if I come to any success or find anything unusually
effective.

September 25, 2001:

Hey, rope the moonor at least throw some
photons at it! Such is the call of James T. Downey, whose site Paint
the Moon suggests an outrageous art project: Get hundreds of thousands
of people to aim their laser pointers at the dark portion of a first-quarter
Moon, all at the same time. Would the reflection of all that coherent
red light be detectable? Author/artist Downey isn't sure...and I have
my doubts as well.

I've tried to shine a laser pointer onto Black Mountain, six miles north
of me, and seen nothing, even with powerful binoculars to look for the
spot. Laser beams are coherent, but they do spread out, and they are attenuated
by dirty air. Also, their power is minuscule...less than a milliwatt each.
Given that the moon is 238,000 miles away, it's almost a half-million
mile round trip, and given the Moon's low albedo (coefficient of reflection)
virtually all the energy that reaches the moon will be scattered and absorbed
by the dark surface and not reflected. (The Moon doesn't look dark, especially
when it's full, but trust me: If it had the albedo of Venus you couldn't
look at it long without serious discomfort.) Give a million people lasers
worth a watt or two, and you would see something, but such lasers
are expensive and dangerous.

Now, I think it might be intriguing to be on the Moon and look back
toward the Earth, especially with good telescopes. Then you might well
see swarms of tiny red pinpoints across the dark expanses of the continents.
Not sure. But since no one is on the Moon, this is an experiment we can't
actually make.

But if you have a laser poiner and want to try it, Downey's suggested time
slot is Saturday, October 27, 2001 at 11:00 PM EDT. Second shot, in case
of lousy weather, is Saturday, November 24, 2001, again at 11:00 EST. I
doubt we'll see anything with the naked eye, but it would be interesting
if professional photographers doing lunar research with large telescopes
register anything peculiar those nights.

September 24, 2001:

Now
I understand why politicians fear "soccer moms." We were waiting
to back out of Carol's sister's driveway this past Saturday...and waiting...and
waiting. Why? Their driveway is across from the entrance to a city park,
and there were numerous kid soccer games going on in the park. So an endless
procession of pinch-faced women in minivans were pulling into and out of
the park, and none would pause to let us back out of our own driveway. None
would even look at us. Each was hunched over the steering wheel, staring
straight ahead, oblivious to any but her own concerns. Watching them was
profoundly weird. I got a sense of extreme and suppressed anger, though
I'm clueless as to why.

September 23, 2001:

Carol and I spent a furious several days helping
her sister Kathy move, hence the gap here. I've been at a loss for what
to say in any event; the attack has put me into a kind of creative funk
over the ugly truth that no one seems to be acknowledging: That if we
create the kind of locked-down America that everybody in government seems
to be demanding, the terrorists have already won. The nutcases
who perpetrated this abomination hate freedom and everything that emerges
from freedom, most pointedly US culture. If we compromise our freedom,
they're getting at least part of what they wantand it's the part
that will in the long run hurt us the worst.

It really is happening, and in many cases to no reasonable end. Every
small-town baseball park is searching purses these days, as if terrorists
feel that eradicating a bush-league ball team will bring their flavor
of Islam closer to world domination. Public spaces are rapidly being regulated
past any possibility of joy or spontaneity. Some people are willing to
be strip-searched to get into a concert. I'm not. The FAA has outlawed
model rocketry, for God's sake. What's next? Banning kites?

I don't necessarily have any better solutions. I do, however, have plenty
of misgivings, particularly regarding special interest groups attempting
to use the current security mania to further their own agendas. Watch for
new campaigns cleverly packaged to associate things with terrorism that
have nothing to do with terrorism (porn and MP3s come to mind most vividly)
and for government at all levels to begin making its deliberations less
accessible in the cause of "security." Is it going to get ugly?
Hell, it's already ugly, and about to get uglier.

September 19, 2001:

Well, precisely 2,005 miles after leaving our
Scottsdale HQ, we pulled into Niles, Illinois, where we stay with Carol's
mom while we're in the Chicago area. Again, it rained all the way from
Davenport Iowa, and we had the misfortune of choosing I88 across Illinois,
not knowing that I88 was being torn up for virtually its entire length.
So the last 180 miles felt like about 400, and took almost as long.

No matter. We're here. Now I'm going to bed.

September 18, 2001:

Got
from Grand Island to the Quad Cities, and it poured all the way. I avoid
the trucks like the plague now, and Carol and I are singing along with CDs
and trying not to stress. Not much to report: I suspect we've been passing
some beautiful countryside, if we could only see it. But between
the dark and the rain and the need to concentrate on driving to avoid being
killed, I didn't get a very good look at either Nebraska nor Iowa, except
to reflect that Iowa is nowhere near as flat as legend would have it. (I
haven't set foot in Iowa for a lot of years, and as best I know have never
been in Nebraska except to cross it by train the middle of the night in
1964.) But again, my visual resolution today was for nothing smaller than
hillsidesexcept that at one point we saw a pair of wild turkeys sitting
on the shoulder of I80, and apparently watching the traffic go by in the
drizzle. Now I know why they call turkey vultures turkey vultures.
There is a strong family resemblance.

September 17, 2001:

Off
we go againand no sooner did we leave Denver than the rains began.
They continued across the plains of northwest Colorado and on into Nebraska,
and followed us down I80 all the way to Grand Island, where we're spending
the night tonight. I am astonished at the way certain nutcase truck drivers
haul their 18 wheelers down the road at 85 MPH in the middle of a driving
rainstorm, passing anybody who gets in their way. You'd think more of them
would go into the ditch than somehow happens. God must love a trucker. I
confess I'm having a hard time doing that tonight.

September 16, 2001:

We took today off from driving and just hung
out in Aurora, Colorado, which hugs Denver on the east much as Scottsdale
hugs Phoenix. We went to mass at Christ the King Old Catholic Church and
had lunch with Bishop Dan Gincig and his wife Rathel. Aurora is an odd
place in a number of ways. You can't spit and not hit a hotel or a restaurantbut
there are no grocery stores and almost no gas stations! Later this afternoon
we had to drive several miles through a dense commercial district that
was clogged like an artery with franchise food places (Outback Steak House,
Sweet Tomatoes, Joe's Crab Shack, Fuddrucker's, Hop's, and countless others)
before we found a crowded and grubby King's Super that was far enough
west that it may not have been in Aurora after all. So does everybody
in Aurora just eat out all the time? Or does the city of Aurora somehow
discriminate against grocery stores?

Aurora has an extremely aggressive crew of sign police, who are constantly
swiping Bishop Dan's signs for Christ the King Church, so I'd wager it has
a land use culture that assumes that what the city planner likes is good
for the city. Not soa city without grocery stores is not a place worth
living in, and you won't catch me there now for more than an occasional
weekend.

September 15, 2001:

Got from Albuquerque to Denver; another 450
miles. Took nine hours, including several pit stops, a refuel, and a leisurely
lunch in a café in the fine old forgotten town of Las Vegas…New Mexico.
The weather was gorgeous until Colorado Springs, when it rained briefly,
which didn't annoy me half as much as having clouds obscuring Pike's Peak,
of which we saw precisely zilch.

In
Raton, New Mexico, we stopped for gas and saw the sign at left. Things
go better with stuff, no?

I was amazed at how completely empty Interstate 25 was most of the way from
Santa Fe up to Pueblo. People were cruising at 90 miles per hour, and an
occasional madman would whistle past at a hundred or so. I find driving
those speeds way too stressful, so we cruised at 80 and had a fine time
of it. The whole point of this trip is to enjoy it, not just to eat miles
as fast as possible.

September 14, 2001:

On
the road. Stopped for the night in Albuquerque, which is 460 miles from
our front door and almost precisely halfway to Denver, where we'll stop
tomorrow. 450 miles is not a bad run for us for a single day, as it happened.
We didn't have to begin at 4 ayem, we got our meals on time, we stopped
to take pictures, and we didn't feel compelled to cruise at 90 miles an
hour, as easy as that might have been at times. This was the first big
trip for the 4Runner, and we find it handles like a dream. It's extremely
comfortable and drives as well as anything we've ever owned, and maybe
better.

In 25 years of marriage, Carol and I have never driven 1800 miles together,
period. So far it's been great fun; we sang hymns and Carpenters songs,
we discussed the world situation, we laughed a lot, and felt like we were
young again, and doing the loopy adventures we had been too sensible and
inhibited to do back when we were in college. Better late than never.

September 13, 2001:

Yup. Driving to Chicago. Taking off tomorrow
AM. Is this nuts or what?

And what are we to make of the events of Tuesday morning? I still can't
get my head fully around the enormity of what was done to usnor
the enormity of the long-term effects if we strike back. And so I find
myself dwelling on trivia and minutia, like the firm conviction that one
or more teams of remorseless journalist types are holed up in a hotel
room somewhere, desperately striving to be the first out with a book on
the tragedy. It happens every time there is some unprecedented event,
and this qualifies, in spades.

Also, it took only a day or so before people were offering "souvenirs"
on eBay, all fragments of the buildings picked up somehow (one must wonder
if all were in fact genuine) after the various buildings' collapse. EBay
quickly pulled all the items offered. Bad taste, I'm surebut will
the buying and selling of WTC fragments be made illegal?

I don't expect to be on the Net while we're en route, so there will be some
delay getting entries posted here over the next week. Figure five days.
I'm not one of those guys who can drill through a thousand miles at a sitting.

September 12, 2001:

For two days we have lived beneath a sky without
airplanes. Does anyone understand how truly weird that is? I grew up along
the approach to O'Hare Field's largest runway. Jets came over so often
that when they stopped for some reason, we all sat bolt upright and asked,
"What was that?" It's 8:00 PM here, and I just climbed up on
the roof deck and looked around. Nowhere are the slowly moving bright
stars converging on Phoenix Sky Harbor from all points of the compass.
There are no jetliners, no private planes. Nothing. The sky, which
I know well and love, looks somehow dead.

Later...

Carol and I had been all ready to fly to Chicago today for Sursum Corda
2001, a conference of Old Catholics, but Bishop Sam Bassett put out an email
Tuesday noonish indicating that with national air travel shut down, no one
could get there but the handful of locals and people within a hundred miles
or so. He was thus canceling the conference, and asked for feedback about
when we might reschedule. So far, May 2002 seems to be the consensus. This
leaves us without a compelling reason to be in Chicago Right Now, but we
still have to be there by October 6 for our big 25th wedding anniversary
party. We are contemplating driving. I mean it. We might very well
drive all 2000-odd miles from Scottsdale to Chicago, not so much because
we must as simply because we can. We have the time and might as well give
it a shot, see some sights, visit some friends, and spend some time in the
intimacy of our 4Runner, talking in the manner that made us best friends
in 1969 and will keep us best friends as long as the Most High will allow.
Not a done deal, fersure, but it's a serious possibility.

September 11, 2001:

God help us all. We are now in the era of Anonymous
Warfare. Has anyone here read the "Cruisin'" columns I did for
GalaxyOnline, back when there was a GalaxyOnline? Here's Part
1 and Part
2.

And merciful heavens, when in human history will we ever again photograph
an airliner colliding with a skyscraper? (The heart hopes never,
but that it happened at all will haunt me until the end of time.)

September 6, 2001:

Now,
this is pretty cool: MapQuest is now
offering aerial photographs of most urban areas in the US. It must use a
fairly loose definition of "urban" because we're in there too,
as the photo at left indicates. Our house is the sole structure in the upper
right quadrant. Note the smudge of blue to the right of the house, which
is our pool. This is the highest magnification available, so if I'm skiny
dipping in our pool here you can't quite tell, which is probably a good
thing. I'd be curious to know, therefore, if this is the highest resolution
they can offeror are there much better photos than these kicking around?
I'd be kind of surprised if there weren't. But hey, go give it a try, just
for fun: Enter your home address, and MapQuest will give you a map in its
familiar fashion. Zoom in all the way, then click on the "Aerial Photo"
tab. The photo takes a few seconds to load, but there you have it.

September 5, 2001:

Slashdot posted a story about a new Open Source
operating system project, one written entirely in 32-bit flat-model assembly
language. It's called Menuet, and
it's a fascinating concept, one almost forgotten in this day of 1.3 Ghz
256 MB systems carrying 32GB hard drives in their bellies: A small GUI-based
system written deliberately for speed in the fastest medium known to programming.
(As most of my readers know, I am a fan of the two extremes of programming:
RAD at the topDelphiand assembly at the bottom. See my
assembly page for more on this.)

I haven't been able to get in to their download area for all the traffic
generated by the Slashdot posting, but I intend to download it and take
a good look. Supposedly, the entire project fits on and boots from a single
1.44MB diskette! (I'm not sure if that includes all the source. Again,
at this posting I haven't been able to download the damned thing.) The
author is Ville Turjanmaa, whose nationality I've been unable to discern,
but wherever he's from, he's a smokin' coder. While you're waiting to
download the OS itself, you might read the
interview with him posted on OSNews.

A couple of odd notes: Don't go to the Menuet Web site with Netscape.
There is some gonzo HTML in the page that aborts and won't render. Use
IE. (Maybe Opera. Not sure, my demo copy expired and I keep meaning to
buy it. Time, time.) Also, Menuet will not talk to USB devices at this
time, and some people forget that USB mice and keyboards are both very
popular. If you have a USB mouse, Menuet won't see it. Ditto a USB keyboard.

I hope to learn a few things reading the code. It can apparently be run
from diskette without having to be installed anywhere on a hard disk, which
is a really smart way to go, at least in these early stages. I'll be interested
to see where Ville takes this thing, which is real-time and thus a natural
for embedded work. Robotics, anyone?

September 3, 2001:

The
September 2001 print issue of The
Atlantic had a couple of articles about the nutso obsession of the American
middle class with getting their kids into the "best" colleges,
a goal for which they will commit almost anything short of murder. The article
is specifically about the "early admissions" scam, in which colleges
tempt promising students to commit to admission by admitting them earlyunder
contract compelling the student to register and then attend. This interests
me only marginally, and I've griped here about the various "Bobo Effects"
in the past, this being merely the most recent one to come to light. But
what makes the article important in my view is compelling evidence that
getting into an Ivy League school matters almost not at all in terms
of how much money you end up making later in life. In fact, the article
points out that while Ivy Leage bobos are thick as flies in the middle tiers
of big companies, universities, and law schools, the people at the topand
the richest people in the countryare as often as not state college
grads, or even college dropouts. I've had that sense, after twenty years
of rubbing elbows with founders of tech companies. Ivy Leaguers don't found
things. They join things, but they rarely run things. They're good
thinkers, and reasonable doers, but lousy creators. I have to wonder if
the horrible duck-press experience of getting into and then sticking with
an Ivy League school burns something out of a personpassion, perhaps,
or maybe just that certain joie de vivre that makes entrepreneurship
possible. Just a thought. Read the article if this interests you, though
you'll have to buy the paper magazine for another month or so before The
Atlantic puts the text online.

September 2, 2001:

I've
been going through piles of stuff brought home last year after my mom
died, and ran across a photo I haven't seen in awhile. It's my college
graduation picture, taken probably May of 1974. I show it here because
it demonstrates something of modest interest: That I once did, in fact,
have hair, and quite a bit of it. (I actually had even more than this
a year or two earlier but got tired of it falling into my mouth, so, always
the pragmatist, I got a haircut.)

The very Seventies muttonchop sideburns don't come across very well, but
they were my trademark then just as a hair-free scalp has become my trademark
now. Interestingly enough, the photo was taken in black and white and then
colorized. I marvel at how close they got the color of my hair, and only
know for sure that it was colorized because the flowers on my tie were white,
not blue. (I had that tie for another 20 years!)

September 1, 2001:

Here's an idea I had years ago and never really
did anything with, in part because I have more than enough house to take
care of without trying to build a newexperimentalone. The
idea is this: Build one of those geodesic dome houses you see here and
about. (We have them here in our neighborhood and they're cool in their
way, though I think they may not be the most efficient use of volume for
the human form.) Now, build a second geodesic framework completly enclosing
the dome house and about five feet away from it, and run chicken wire
or some other loose-mesh hardware cloth over the skeletal faces of the
framework. Now plant a climbing vine all around the house, and encourage
it to climb the framework that encloses the house.

In a year or two (assuming you choose a fast-growing vine appropriate to
your climate) you'll have a green, living, air-porous shade over your house.
My question (not being an architect or an industrial HVAC engineer) is the
following: Would the shade factor keep the house cool to an extent that
is not obviated by the house's inability to radiate heat into the sky on
clear nights? In other words, is it a win from an air conditioning standpoint?
I haven't thought very hard about snow and ice, since those don't show their
faces down here except on exceedingly rare occasions. But for hot climates,
I have to wonder if this could be a useful way to build a house. Any thoughts?